The Cage (9 page)

“Really?” The right side of Maggie's mouth jerked up. “Sorry. At least you don't look like curdled milk anymore.”

Beryl found her hands slowly uncurling and she took off her mittens to look at them curiously. She felt the width of her smile. “I'm the photographer for the
Natural Photography
team here in town. I'm from Boston.” Beryl listened to the words. No hesitation. “Boston, Massachusetts,” she added.

Maggie nodded. “I've heard of it. I'm from Atlanta, but I hate the heat more than anything.” She looked off to the left quickly, but Beryl saw that it was only a snow-covered car. “I've always figured there's only so much you can sweat, but you can always put on more clothing.”

Beryl laughed at that and saw with surprise the small shyness of Maggie's smile.

“No, really,” Maggie continued, “I like the cold. I eat more up here and my body heats up. In Atlanta I was always feeling a little sickly, like I couldn't breathe in all the way. Here I can breathe.” She tapped herself in the chest with her fist. “You sure your ears are all right? Is there anything that can be hurt there? Some sort of important muscle or something? Look, it's not my fault. They said to shock you out of it. Your ears just looked handy.”

Beryl nodded and touched her ears. They felt hot.

“I also moved up here for my kids. I want them to grow up where there's enough room to play.”

The frozen plains spread out from them in every direction. Beryl laughed. This time Maggie looked surprised that she had said something funny. Beryl realized she hadn't laughed much since this trip had started.

They continued to talk together until the sun rose and Maggie's watch was over. They went into the hotel for breakfast. Maggie had a huge meal: waffles, eggs, Cream of Wheat.
“It's not only the cold,” she said. “It's terror. I see just one of those things moving through the night, big as a goddamn boat, and these pancakes are completely gone.” She patted her belly and snorted. She was a stringy woman, the kind who was always eating Yodels and Snickers and moving quickly, heat pouring off her. “In Atlanta, the biggest, scariest thing I ever saw were Dobermans, and they only weigh eighty pounds.”

“How'd you get this job?” Beryl asked.

“Oh, they had signs up about it for months. No one wanted it. Not out all night in the cold, not looking for hungry polar bears. But I wanted it. I needed it. Money, you know. They wouldn't let me take it at first. I'm a woman, hmm, and black.” Maggie looked straight at Beryl for a second, and Beryl wasn't sure exactly what her face should be showing. “It's not like they said anything about the black part, but they talked a lot about the woman part, me being weaker and stuff. Like the biggest beefed-up man would be able to take a polar bear charge any better than little old me. Also, the town still thought of me as a tourist, practically from the tropics. I mean, I'd been here a whole year by then but they still figured every day would be the last straw, that I'd pack up and go.”

Maggie rubbed her thumb slowly around the lip of her coffee mug. “Then this kid got mauled out in the rocks by the beach. Mauled bad, the skull cracked before the bear lost interest. The kid's head was in the bear's mouth, kid screaming,
when it just spat him out and walked off. Kid lived, but he lost his sense of balance. His legs are perfectly fine, but you stand him upright and he falls over like the room tilted.”

Maggie let go of the cup, put both hands in her lap. “So after that they hired me. I like the job. These two months each year are a kind of vacation to me. My husband, Gerry, has been gone six years now, back down south. Couldn't deal with things up here. The one winter he spent here, he practically lived in the fireplace.” Maggie smiled, looked away. “These two months pay for all the extras the kids and I need for the rest of the year, the things I can't handle being just a mail carrier. For these two months the kids stay at the neighbor's. I live alone in the car. I carry a gun, wear a uniform. I'm tough. For two months I'm no mother. I'm fucking Dirty Harry. You know, it's different.”

Maggie and Beryl agreed to meet that night so Beryl could photograph a night watch. Beryl didn't tell anyone else on the team. She left dinner early, put on her warmest clothes. Maggie told her it got cold sitting still in the car all night. Beryl snuck out the back of the hotel.

She stepped out of the double doors into a cold that made her think at first, Well, that's not so bad, but even before she'd walked the ten steps to the car, the cold began to slide its way under, pulling tight about her limbs. It didn't tingle like the cold she knew. It numbed her skin and slowed her movements. Sitting in the car she found herself thinking about itching her nose for a while before she actually did it.

They began to drive slow methodical circles about town,
passing down each back alley and driveway, scanning in the bright shifting light of the headlights every building and backyard. Light and dark slid across the snow in wild movements. Everything looked as if it were a polar bear motionless and staring, or leaping quickly away across the landscape.

The first time they reached the end of town near the dump, Maggie stopped the car. She looked around carefully and said, “This is where most of them sneak into town, once they've decided the dump doesn't have enough food for them.” She put her hand on the door, picked up the rifle and said, “Stay here.” She stepped out of the car.

Beryl felt the cold harsh against her face and then the door slammed and the car's heater hummed on. She hesitated before jumping out the other door. The snow squeaked beneath her feet and she was conscious of the dark behind her and the boulders off to her side. “What the hell are you doing?” she asked.

Maggie roared, “Get back in the car!”

Beryl felt the voice like wind on her ears. She got back in the car, sat with both hands open in front of her. She watched Maggie raise the binoculars and sweep them slowly across the rocks between the car and the dump. Maggie looked small against the darkness. Her hands held the binoculars by her face and she pointed her elbows out front as though waiting for a blow. The rifle hung over her shoulder. When she was done, she got back in the car.

Maggie put the rifle down and sat with both of her hands on the steering wheel. “Don't you ever,” she said, “
ever
step
out of this car. Not while it's night and I'm on a patrol. I don't care if a bear is playing jump rope with my intestines, you will not step outside. Is that clear?”

Beryl nodded. She sat very still.

“You're looking pale again.” said Maggie. “Stop that.” She looked away and then back. “God, you can look sickly.” She started the car and backed out slowly onto the road. “I'm sorry. I should've warned you about that. The reason I get out of the car is 'cause I can spot them better. I've seen more bears there than anywhere else. Sometimes I can stop them from going into town. I shout or drive them away with the car. It's not like they're scared. More embarrassed. I think I've saved some bears that way.

“I stand out there and look, about three times an hour, thirty times each night, and I never feel calm about it. The rifle is mostly for my own comfort. It's a nice weight, you know, on my shoulder. I'm not allowed to shoot them unless it's clearly their life or mine. Sometimes I hope the sound of the gun will work as a distraction.”

“Once, two years ago,” Maggie said, “when I was out of the car, doing the circle, I turned too slowly. Something was glittering halfway up a hill. Couldn't make out what it was. When I continued my turn, I was suddenly looking through the binoculars at fur.”

Maggie made a wavy gesture with her hand. Beryl didn't know if it was to show fur or to describe her emotions at the time.

“I pulled down my glasses. It was like I was trying to move
quickly, but everything got slower and slower. There was this bear, this huge bear, running at me, you know, swaying like they do, so goddamn big. Breathing, I could hear it. Black nose.” Maggie put her fingers against her nose and held them there for a moment, thinking.

“Forty-five, fifty feet away, running forward. That nose for some reason was the thing I fixed on. Its black nose, all wet. I threw my binoculars as hard as I could at it, turned and got into the car. Still so damn slow. I had this thought, you know, this thought like someone else's voice in my head, that I wouldn't make it. I felt bad for my kids.” She touched the car door on her side.

“I was pulling my left leg in when the bear hit the door, the window shattered in around me and the door slapped down on my calf, breaking it. I didn't feel the pain. I sort of heard a noise, but didn't feel anything. I looked out. This bear's face just filling my window. These furry jaws not four inches from my nose, not even a windowpane between us.

“It was so beautiful—the fur so clean. Very white. A young bear. It had bad breath, like a dog on a wet day. And then I was driving away, fast. The bear fell back to the ground. I don't even remember touching the gas.”

Many times that night Beryl watched Maggie step out of the car, out into the dark silence of the Arctic. The snow squeaked loudly beneath her. Each time Maggie turned slowly in front of the car, scanning the rock piles ahead through the infrared binoculars, searching the night for white fur against white snow, or perhaps the bright reflection of eyes close enough
to pick up the headlights. Each time Beryl scanned the snow also, watching for bears. She thought if anything happened, Maggie would have the gun. Beryl could do nothing but watch.

Beryl stared out the window into the dark. She imagined herself alone and warm, striding out across the snow, coming to a halt at the sound of the car, watching its bright lights whirl busily about in a tight circle, the two heads inside facing forward. She watched it depart, the sound of its engine muffled by the snow, her heavy white face turning to see its lights fade away around a corner.

“Why do you care about the bears?” Beryl asked.

Maggie said, “I don't really know. It's many things. To me they're beyond most animals 'cause they're unpredictable. They don't react the same way every time, like seals always diving, or muskox facing you, horns first. I've seen the same bear charge a car one day and run away the next. I even saw one roll over on its back and toss snow up in front of the headlights, wanting to play.”

Maggie rubbed at her lower jaw with the inside of her thumb. “Once Jeff Shelbourne, a purely mean bastard, threw a steak out to a mother at the dump and while she was getting it, he shot both her cubs. In front of people too. Well, of course he was fined, but it's not like prison or anything.” Maggie turned to look at Beryl, then back to the road. “Within a week that mother got Jeff while he was carrying the garbage out onto the porch. It was like she'd been waiting for
him there on his porch, just sitting. I think she tracked him, I don't know. Jeff was the last polar bear fatality in this town. Three years ago.”

Maggie worked the controls of the spotlight, its circle of visibility rolling silently across the snow. “I have great respect for the bears. They truly scare me.”

Through the night Maggie and Beryl sang country ballads, camp songs, the themes from “The Brady Bunch” and “Speed Racer.” Toward morning as the cold was even seeping into their mouths, Beryl told Maggie about how she wanted to go to all the wild places in the world photographing animals. “It's what David, the camera guy from the group, does for a living. But I want to do it differently. He likes the warm sunny places Club Med hasn't quite discovered. I want to go to the extremes: the Gobi Desert, Patagonia, Siberia. I've lived in a city all my life. The majority of my food comes wrapped in plastic. My home has central heating. My car has air-conditioning. Sometimes when I wake up in the morning I can't remember which season it is.

“I want to learn to survive on my own, to face extremes. I won't have really lived otherwise, not by the terms of this world, where there are rhythms like drought and cold, thirst and plenty. This may sound silly but sometimes I feel like my cat, still recognizable as a wild creature but neutered and declawed, made cuddly. She sits all day in the sun on the window ledge, watching life through the window.”

Beryl realized they'd been talking for a while. In the long night, time passed differently. The sky was still black above
but the drifts had begun to glow slightly in the dark. They'd seen nothing moving on the landscape all night long except the hissing dances of the snow.

Maggie nodded. “For me,” she said, “I don't want travel. I want nothing but this place.” She paused at an intersection, twisted about on the seat trying to see all around. She drove off to the right. “I'd like to stay up here, raise the kids. They won't live here when they're grown. I know that already. Still, I want my time with them. Sometimes when they say something new, I wonder where the hell they came from.” Maggie touched her belly and added, “Not from here.”

The car heater clicked on. Beryl felt a blast of heat across her face as dry as from an oven. Maggie said, “And I'd like to continue these patrols. To see the bears.”

Beryl mentioned cautiously, “My dreams up here have been pretty weird.” She glanced at Maggie, then looked at her hands held open on her knees. “A lot of them are about the bears, but not as if they're bears. They're dancing or we're having dinner. Isn't that weird?”

“No,” said Maggie, looking out into the snow. “I dream like that all the time.”

The two women looked at each other for a moment, and then away.

After Beryl was followed by the bear, she often found herself sitting by the window of her hotel room, looking out. She felt differently now toward what she saw. She thought, I cannot go out there, not unless I'm in a car—even outside I have to stay in. The vast white prairie extended to the horizon beneath a solid blue sky. She still hadn't gotten used to the purity of the colors in this thin air, like scenes in a stained-glass window. Even the browns and grays of the houses in town were less muddy than down south, less dulled. She thought, All this and I can only look. As though it were already on David's film, playing on a flat screen.